The disc’s private, devotional
title indicates its scope. Most of the music is by Purcell
though Blow, Humphrey and Croft are also included – the former
two were a decade Purcell’s senior and Croft was one of his
successors as organist at Westminster Abbey.

Most
of the settings are in English though rather cleverly the
disc begins and ends with two Latin motets, one by Purcell
and the other by Blow. They introduce the full vocal ensemble
- Paul Agnew (tenor), Konstantin Wolff (bass), Thomas Michael
Allen (counter-tenor), Hannah Morrison and Claire Debono
(sopranos), directed by William Christie who plays harpsichord
and organ. Blow’s ethereal five-part motet, Salvator mundi, is
especially beautiful. Throughout the disc we experience singing
of great purity, spiritual refinement and beauty. Hannah
Morrison, for instance, sings Croft’s What art thou? with
real simplicity, dead centre of the note intonation, and
tonal purity. She responds to the text, as do all the singers,
with immediacy and surety.

Agnew’s
urgent Hallelujahs in Purcell’s A Divine Hymn attest
to his perceptive awareness of the work’s nourishment and
succour – sung moreover with all his accustomed intelligence
and stylistic intelligence. Thomas Michael Allen is listed
as a countertenor but in something such as Pelham Humphrey’s Lord!
I have sinned- and in fact throughout the disc -he
actually sings high tenor, using the head voice in rather
a French fashion.

Claire
Debono, Agnew, and Konstantin Wolff conjoin in a properly
dramatic Saul and the Witch of Endor ('In guilty night'). Wolff’s
is a strong and resilient presence and Agnew deploys very
considerable vocal subtlety in delineating his part; Debono
too. The notes link this florid scena quite explicitly to
Charpentier but that may well be a reflection as much of
Christie’s own stylistic imperatives and the French origin
of those notes. Perhaps the most touching work here is Close
thine eyes and sleep secure which is shared by Morrison
and Wolff and beautifully, chastely done. And An Evening
Hymn is sung by Hannah Morrison with exquisite, almost
boyish purity.

If
I can register a small troubling thought; whilst much of
the singing and playing - Elizabeth Kenny (theorbo) and Anne-Marie
Lasla (viola da gamba) – is truly lovely I did find myself
rebelling against so much of it. An odd thought maybe but
the refined purity seems to distance one from some of the
more secular implications of the text. An Evening Hymn for
instance, though beautifully accomplished, lacks the sense
of intimacy and complexity set up in the opposition between
body and soul that the text embodies. In my experience only
a very few singers assume this burden of explication in their
singing – Michael Chance prominently, whose understanding
of the weight to be placed on the words “body”, “bed” and “soul” is
unparalleled in my experience; his video performance, that
is, not the recording now on Brilliant Classics.

Nevertheless
I wouldn’t wish to characterise this disc as bloodless beauty.
Its communicative powers are strong, the recording is first
class and there are trilingual texts. I enjoyed it; but in
truth I was seldom really moved.

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